Dr Caprice Hollins, the Director of Equity, Race & Learning Support for Seattle’s public schools, has previously criticised individualism, long-term planning (or “future time orientation”) and the speaking of grammatical English as “white values.” The expectation among teachers that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organisational standards is, according to Dr Hollins, a form of “cultural racism.”

Parents ought to be ashamed for allowing bureaucrats to politicize black underachievement and blame whites instead of erecting a mirror in front of so-called underprivileged minorities. In an op-ed in The Seattle Times, Seattle writer and blogger Matt Rosenberg noted that the white privilege conference has little, if anything, to do with helping black students improve academically. They’ll be well-equipped, however, in useless, politically correct finger-pointing. “What we have here,” writes Rosenberg, “is an institutional evasion of personal responsibility.”

I guess the trick is that pretty much you can deride blacks as viciously as you like -- hitting all the stereotypes like "Colored People's Time" and all that -- so long as you throw in the saving asterisk at the end: *But it's all white people's fault.